But I am finding my twitter feed today full of the headline “Advertising agencies have become the gift-wrapping department”.

Now to be fair to you, your argument is more balanced than that headline suggests. “Even a great present without wrapping looks dull” as you write in your article.

But I suspect that a few too many twitterati are enjoying the headline (admittedly not the headline of your post) just a bit too much.

And perhaps not reading your piece that carefully.

This irks me.

Because this lazy recycling of a click baiting headline encourages the creakingly antiquated notion that creativity is merely the wrapper (the bit that gets attention) for a piece of information (the bit persuades people).

While this might amuse and serve the interests of those who’d wish to relegate the work of agencies as peripheral and superficial, the fact of the matter is that this perspective both undervalues creativity, and misunderstand how much of advertising actually works.

As Paul Feldwick has written in his article ’50 years of using the wrong model of TV advertising’: “Visuals, sounds, symbols, music, gestures, context and a host of other things are not aids to recall or attention (or ‘engagement’), but exist in their own right as central elements in communication.”

This is not to dismiss the need for relevance, memorability and long-term brand building in communications.

Or to deny that what people really need and want are good product experiences.

Or to have no commercial and creative interest in agencies swimming back upstream and getting more involved in designing such experiences with their clients.

But the suggestion that we merely add the sizzle to other people’s sausages – that we are at the superficial end of the business while others get on with the stuff that really matters – is unhelpful at best.

I agree with you 150%, but we have to assume that people are very fortunate and have too many presents, so the question our industry is fixated with answering right now is “How is your present going to stand out?” The solution for many is great wrapping- you see this even more with viral ads. There’s a fairly recent paper “The Rising Cost of Human Attention” from the Harvard Business School that starts to explain what’s happening with attention http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/14-055_2ef21e7e-7529-4864-b0f0-c64e4169e17f.pdf

Completely agree Dave – I am very interested in what is in the wrapping paper.
The hard thing for agencies is that within the client world the people responsible for coming up with the present largely don’t work in the marketing department and don’t have a tradition of employing agencies to help them make better presents. Great creatives pointed at the present could be the competitive advantage that some companies really need but as an industry we’ve got to show we care about that stuff. And all too often we sit there like a one year old obsessing about the wrapping paper.

Paul Feldwick’s critique of the TV advertising model over the least 50 years implies what may have been called the golden age of advertising wasn’t so -I am guessing it takes in Webster’s work too? I think his argument goes it was a success in spite of itself. Not because people bought the products then?

Criticising Paul’s work is a bit of a curates egg as is much of what passes as advertising thinking today. And we need more thinking less.

However some of today think regarding advertising is worth challenging. Today’s trends seem to call on shaky neuro science or cognitive scientist’s experiments that work well in labs but not so much in real life.

Some of their experiments that attempt to show consumer behaviour or biases are are so confusing it is hardly surprising we make bad choices when confused by the tricky little game like questions. See Kahneman’s Linda problem for example.

And yet with all this brain power and knowledge in agencies today (and it is inspiring to be honest) that show peoples biases to act irrationally – be it buying the socks on the left or product that start with their own name, or more often when they smell bread or when they feel sad because of the brand story.

The point seems to be that advertising needs no rational message regarding the product because consumers are irrational. All that is required is just emotional messaging. Not even a mix according to some.

However I am not convinced that armed with all this that TV advertising is in a golden age let alone a healthy condition. – I think maybe in fact it is regressing. Like other areas of society when it comes to defending people’s ability to think for themselves and dare I say even logically at times. Advertising today has no interest in consumers as autonomous sentient beings does it? And it is worse off for it.

I can actually see a way that non branded good may catch up will branded ones. Not to mention products that may well come out of China in a few years that look and act like well know brands. Of course the western brand will still have it’s emotional attachments (equity) but will people be persuaded to buy a car that is very similar to a Land Rover but 1/2 price?

So while some countries and manufacturers seek to improve their products and compete because they believe (wrongly apparently) that people like things cheaper, quicker, bigger, faster more efficient – western advertising feels that it is pointless telling this to the consumer because they are irrational.

We know that people are not all that brand loyal easily switching as and when BOGOF exist for example and as non branded products catch up in quality be they food products or automotive ones. I think the consumer will decide they like the present.

I agree Jim.
Most of John Webster’s work was a great present brilliantly wrapped.
The ads always stood out amongst everyone else’s.
So you unwrapped them.
And once unwrapped, you always knew who they were for and why you should care.
Stanley Pollitt, or Jane Newman, or Jim Williams, or Jon Steele did present.
John did the wrapping.
We haven’t got any creative planners doing the present anymore.
It’s fashionable to think the wrapping is the present.